e future and opposition to the realities of social and political life. If the prevailing society is degenerate, the solution must be to create a new society. The society would be pious and pure, like the Church, like the Brazil that was, like the kingdom of God that ought to be:
[A]fter reciting the rosary, he spoke to them of war,
of countries that were killing each other overy booty
as hyenas fight over carrion, and in great distress
commented that since Brazil was now a republic it, too,
would act like other heretical nations. They heard him
say that the Can must be rejoicing; they heard him say
that the time had come to put down roots and build a
Temple, which, when the end of the world came, would be
what Noah's Ark had been in the beginning (36).
This utopian dream encounters the realities of fin de siecle Brazil and forms the basis for action in The War of the End of the World. The complex pattern of political factionalism (and opportunism) contributes to the texture of The War of the End of the World. The two principal mainstream parties are the Jacobins and Autonomists, the former strongly republican in sentiment and the latter more monarchist in sentiment. As a Jacobin/Republican, Epaminodas Goncalves officially views the people of Canudos as dangerous political squatters whose unity in diversity could become dangerous to the stability of the republic: "They're occupying land that doesn't belong to them," he says, "and living promiscuously, like animals" (8). As the leader of the Autonomists, Baron Canabrava, a major Bahian landowner, longs for the aristocratic stability of the monarchy and becomes one of the principal material victims of the people of Canudos, who loot and destroy his estate and cause his wife's nervous breakdown. Both Jacobins and Autonomists oppose the Canudos movement, mixing tru...